review of Inside Out and a conversation with foreign directors

Last week was a pretty good work week, I think, and I was able to meet a few deadlines and got some articles sent to my editors. I loved Inside Out and was happy to be able to review it for Juice. Then I was able to interview three foreign directors who were screening their films at the Cinemalaya Film Festival this year and that was published in the Manila Bulletin. You can check out at these links:

Inside Out is another triumph of fantastic story-telling from the creative minds at Pixar. One day, I’m going to write a movie for them. I’m going to be that good some day.

I really loved Inside Out. I was just amazed at how tight the story-telling is at most, if not all, of Pixar’s movies. Nothing is wasted or excessive and they can manage to address so many different age levels in one film without ever having to resort to being derivative or reductive. Most of the Pixar movies I’ve seen I’ve loved and they never seem to cater to the lowest common denominator. They just tell their stories and do it in the best way possible and it is universally loved across the globe. I envy them for that.

And the mere fact that they don’t even have to resort to rebooting existing material but work on fresh and original material most of the time astounds me. A real lesson that Hollywood should start learning — stop appealing to nostalgia and just looking for existing material to adapt into a movie. Original and fresh ideas are just as great and just as lucrative if you do it right.

On the other side of the coin, speaking with these directors from Turkey, Burma, and China was an eye-opener that the Philippines is not the only country suffering from mainstream and commercial oppression in the film industry. It’s a worldwide problem for filmmakers everywhere in getting serious and thought-provoking movies done. But each country has a different cultural roadblock as well and it was interesting sitting down and getting to ask these questions from people I don’t think I would ever have the chance to meet had I not been in this job.